LibreOffice adoption soaring, but OpenOffice still open source king

LibreOffice has proven its worth, but it's a long way from being #1.

More than two years after LibreOffice came into being, it's hard to call the open source office software anything but a success. There are possibly tens of millions of people who use it—or at least have it installed on their computers. But how close is LibreOffice to overtaking OpenOffice, the king of open source productivity suites?

The short answer is that LibreOffice has a long way to go.

OpenOffice (which descended from Sun's StarOffice) has existed as an open source project for more than a decade. Concerns about OpenOffice's future after the Oracle/Sun merger led a core group of OpenOffice contributors to create LibreOffice, which is based on the same original code base but is getting more frequent updates than OpenOffice.

Oracle no longer controls OpenOffice, but the makers of the two office suites aren't working together. Oracle transferred control of OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation, while LibreOffice is maintained by the newly created Document Foundation.

To top it all off, there have been disputes about LibreOffice adoption figures, with one IBM employee and OpenOffice developer last fall writing a series of blog posts titled "LibreOffice's Dubious Claims."

There's little doubt that OpenOffice is still more widely used, but getting an exact count isn't simple. Let's take a look at what we know.

Counting open source usage a complex task

LibreOffice won over the makers of most major Linux-based operating systems, which now ship LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice as the standard office suite. But Linux users can download OpenOffice if they prefer it, and Linux in any case is only about 1 percent of the worldwide desktop market dominated by Windows (and Macs).

The Document Foundation recently announced that "rates of entirely new client IP addresses requesting updates each day [are] over the 100,000 mark," four times higher than at the same point last year.

I asked LibreOffice spokesman and Document Foundation co-founder Italo Vignoli to explain the significance of that number.

"People requesting updates have a working copy of LibreOffice pinging the servers," Vignoli wrote in an e-mail. "This means that they have downloaded LibreOffice (or they have got the package from a CD, a USB key, an alternative download site, or any other trusted source), they have installed the software and they are using the software (otherwise their PC would not ping the server)."

This generally accounts for individual users rather than corporate deployments. On the whole, "we can assume that out there are over 21 million individuals actively using LibreOffice with the update feature switched on," Vignoli said.

The numbers released by LibreOffice and OpenOffice aren't quite apples-to-apples, but they do suggest more interest in OpenOffice. OpenOffice 3.4 has been downloaded more than 40 million times since being released in May 2012. The 21 million figure of individual users of LibreOffice includes all the users racked up since LibreOffice became available in January 2011.

Then again, LibreOffice's method of counting theoretically includes only active users, leaving out those who downloaded the software and then discarded it.

Individual downloaders aren't the only source of adoption. There are corporate deployments, as well as users of Linux distributions that pre-install LibreOffice. Perhaps most users of distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu now use LibreOffice by virtue of it being the default option, but nothing is preventing them from using something else.

"In general, we estimate a figure very close to 100 percent of Linux desktops (which are also difficult to estimate but should be between 20 and 30 million), plus 30 to 40 million Windows users (based on downloads, migrations, requests for support and development), and a good number of MacOS users," Vignoli said. "Of course, these are estimates, and not unit figures based on license activations (and any estimate can be accurate or inaccurate, as the word estimate should imply, although there are people in other projects who imply that our estimates are cheating, which also explains why we are very shy about providing numbers we are not extremely confident about)."

OpenOffice adoption is still big, and growing

It stands to reason that there is a bigger base of existing OpenOffice users than LibreOffice ones, both among individuals and corporations, thanks to its long history and name recognition inside and outside the open source community. It's also beating LibreOffice on new downloads, as far as we can tell.

OpenOffice's published download stats show that it often hits 160,000 or 170,000 new downloads a day. On a "bad" day, the number might drop to 120,000.

Perhaps LibreOffice's figure of new downloads is higher than the 100,000 new IP addresses requesting updates each day, but we don't know based on the available data. "We are also working at getting a similar statistic for downloads, which measure the number of people who get the software but not the number of people who use it," Vignoli said. "We would of course like to provide the most accurate figures, but we are still a very young project (and we have been constantly upgrading our infrastructure during the course of the last two years, since we have launched LibreOffice)."

Controversy over LibreOffice adoption figures arose last October when Rob Weir, an OpenOffice contributor and IBM architect who works on the Open Document Format, wrote the aforementioned series of blog posts questioning "LibreOffice's Dubious Claims."

Whereas OpenOffice releases daily download rates, LibreOffice adoption numbers come "from download claims in press releases, and then only at long intervals," Weir wrote. "We have no idea what exactly they are counting. They have never made the detailed stats public. This does not mean that the numbers are incorrect, of course. It just means that no one outside of their project’s leadership is able to verify the claims."

Weir took the projects' total download numbers and calculated an average daily download rate of 29,460 for LibreOffice and 127,326 for OpenOffice.

Clearly, LibreOffice is enjoying much quicker adoption now. Weir's average was based on the total number of downloads of LibreOffice since January 2011, including the early days when LibreOffice was counting fewer than 10,000 new users a day.

Still, OpenOffice has "a massive brand advantage," LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks, an employee of Attachmate's SUSE business unit, told Ars. "They have a huge and valuable brand that we helped build for many years. It's an enduring sadness that they are not working with us. Clearly, they have more downloads, I think there's no doubt about that. But we're growing rather rapidly."

For Vignoli, it's not just about the numbers. "I do not think that the success of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice can yet be measured with numbers, because we have launched just 30 months ago and we are still growing at an incredibly fast rate," he said. "Today, we are listed amongst the largest free software projects, which is something that no one would have believed in September 2010."

Promoted Comments

Since the forking was triggered by Oracle alienating a large fraction of OO's external development community, after they washed their hands of it and handed all the IP over to the Apache Foundation, why weren't the two groups able to merge back together?

The Apache Foundation (mostly) controls OOo now, and it's licensed under an Apache license. Apache hasn't shown a real interest in addressing the problems that drove developers to fork in the first place. Cooperation is further hampered because LO is under the GNU LPGL, like OOo used to be. The two projects' licensing schemes are not entirely compatible, so improvements contributed to one can't necessarily be shared freely with the other unless the developer submits to both.

atergo wrote:

I was under the impression that OpenOffice is no longer supported...that's why I switched to LibreOffice. Is that not the case?

Development on OpenOffice is glacial right now; since being transferred to Apache the project hasn't released any new versions. Like the article said, most of the 3rd party and some of the 1st party devs jumped ship. That's not to say that nothing is going on for OOo. IBM is a major contributor; I believe they've donate their Lotus Symphony user interface to the OOo project, which should become part of the OOo release eventually. But as far as speed of development and the kind of ongoing, broad community support that OOo used to have, LO's where it's at.

FrisbeeFreek wrote:

Is there a practical functional difference between OpenOffice & Libre? I am long time user of MSOffice, but I'm building a RaspberryPi console, and I will need to load an office suite onto it. I'm mostly concerned with casual Word & Presentation software.

LO is getting updates more quickly and development has been moving it away from its Java dependency (still not there yet if you need the database application to work, or certain wizards for documents). They're also removing a lot of cruft from the codebase that's not relevant anymore, mostly support for older and non-popular file formats. LO's in the Pi store, so you can check it out today if you have the device already.

LibreOffice has a much healthier community of developers than OpenOffice. If OpenOffice doesn't get more contributers, in the long run, it's doomed. Eventually LibreOffice will have decent mind-share but that takes years.

Eventually LibreOffice will have decent mind-share but that takes years.

That's okay. Open source is patient and in no rush.

That's one of the several characteristics why open source may arrive late to the party, but in the end is always destined to be the only one left standing. That is, for horizontal commodity products widely used.

For specialized vertical market software, I'm not so sure. (just to contrive an example: software to design lens shape for particular optical prescriptions in various materials such as transparent aluminum) There probably would be some success stories, if the specialty is large enough to draw enough developer interest who have that particular itch.

Since the forking was triggered by Oracle alienating a large fraction of OO's external development community, after they washed their hands of it and handed all the IP over to the Apache Foundation, why weren't the two groups able to merge back together?

As Vignoli points out, LibreOffice has almost completely displaced OpenOffice on the Linux desktop, which is a fairly large part of the target market for open source office suites.

One of the historical problems with Sun's stewardship of OpenOffice was that they made it very difficult for Linux-specific improvements to be accepted upstream. The major Linux distributors dealt with that issue by using a special OOo variant maintained by Novell that greatly improved the quality of the suite for Linux users. Those patches have all been mainlined in LibreOffice, but equivalent improvements still aren't present in OOo.

Nobody in the Linux landscape would have any reason to want to use or contribute to OOo. And the Linux desktop is frankly where the vast majority of people who are interested in contributing to an open source office suite are going to come from.

Since the forking was triggered by Oracle alienating a large fraction of OO's external development community, after they washed their hands of it and handed all the IP over to the Apache Foundation, why weren't the two groups able to merge back together?

Pride?

Maybe proof that my licensing regime is bigger than or somehow otherwise superior to yours?

I saw my brother using OpenOffice on windows recently, completely oblivious to the fact that there is now libreoffice. I got him exposed to Linux long ago, but he gave up due to hardware support and lack of games. He moved to windows and took his favourite apps with him.

Is there a practical functional difference between OpenOffice & Libre? I am long time user of MSOffice, but I'm building a RaspberryPi console, and I will need to load an office suite onto it. I'm mostly concerned with casual Word & Presentation software.

He moved to windows and took his favourite apps with him. I think that is one source of OpenOffice's resilience.

That and, in my case, I have a fair number of OO items, specifically spreadsheets, that do not behave the same in LibreOffice. I could spend a day on the weekend and export/import/re-setup formatting in LO, but in reality, OO works fine, LO doesn't really bring anything extra to the table for me and or most ordinary users, why switch? Sure, someday maybe should OO get axed or really starts to FUBAR things (read: bugs, crashes, etc), but for now...

ADD: I only tried LO due to Oracle having their hand in things. Once OO went Apache, switched back due to above issues.

Since the forking was triggered by Oracle alienating a large fraction of OO's external development community, after they washed their hands of it and handed all the IP over to the Apache Foundation, why weren't the two groups able to merge back together?

Pride?

Maybe proof that my licensing regime is bigger than or somehow otherwise superior to yours?

A commenter above you mentions that there were enhancements that Sun kept out of upstream and so Novell kept a version of OpenOffice for Linux. That was brought into the mainline LibreOffice.

Also, I have found LibreOffice is moving along faster than OpenOffice has in many years. I remember requesting that the row limit in OpenOffice be bumped up from the 64k limit. The OpenOffice developer response was that if you had more than 64k rows you should use the database instead. Lots of people, myself included, needed exactly what I got from a spreadsheet but with more rows. Changes like that, and discussion of them, is much more open with LibreOffice.

So while pride may be part of the issue, there are some substantial reasons for the continuing difference. Plus, part of why Oracle let go of OpenOffice was that so many people left for LibreOffice. Realizing they had beaten it close to death they then gave it up since it wasn't worth so much anymore. It's hard to put that genie back in the bottle. And for those people that were willing to leave OpenOffice for LibreOffice because it was important to them, I can certainly see why they wouldn't be quick to just hand control back to someone else.

Is there a practical functional difference between OpenOffice & Libre? I am long time user of MSOffice, but I'm building a RaspberryPi console, and I will need to load an office suite onto it. I'm mostly concerned with casual Word & Presentation software.

LibreOffice is getting updated faster than OpenOffice. I switched to LibreOffice a while ago and haven't looked back.

Since the forking was triggered by Oracle alienating a large fraction of OO's external development community, after they washed their hands of it and handed all the IP over to the Apache Foundation, why weren't the two groups able to merge back together?

The Apache Foundation (mostly) controls OOo now, and it's licensed under an Apache license. Apache hasn't shown a real interest in addressing the problems that drove developers to fork in the first place. Cooperation is further hampered because LO is under the GNU LPGL, like OOo used to be. The two projects' licensing schemes are not entirely compatible, so improvements contributed to one can't necessarily be shared freely with the other unless the developer submits to both.

atergo wrote:

I was under the impression that OpenOffice is no longer supported...that's why I switched to LibreOffice. Is that not the case?

Development on OpenOffice is glacial right now; since being transferred to Apache the project hasn't released any new versions. Like the article said, most of the 3rd party and some of the 1st party devs jumped ship. That's not to say that nothing is going on for OOo. IBM is a major contributor; I believe they've donate their Lotus Symphony user interface to the OOo project, which should become part of the OOo release eventually. But as far as speed of development and the kind of ongoing, broad community support that OOo used to have, LO's where it's at.

FrisbeeFreek wrote:

Is there a practical functional difference between OpenOffice & Libre? I am long time user of MSOffice, but I'm building a RaspberryPi console, and I will need to load an office suite onto it. I'm mostly concerned with casual Word & Presentation software.

LO is getting updates more quickly and development has been moving it away from its Java dependency (still not there yet if you need the database application to work, or certain wizards for documents). They're also removing a lot of cruft from the codebase that's not relevant anymore, mostly support for older and non-popular file formats. LO's in the Pi store, so you can check it out today if you have the device already.

I have used Open Office for several years ever since Microsoft began drastically changing the UI for MS Office. Imo Open Office is a capable program which meets my needs (on Windows 7) which uses drop-down menus that I prefer.

I kept track of the controversy about Oracle's Control of Open Office. But my concerns were removed when the Apache Software Foundation took control of Open Office.

I see no compelling reason to go through the hassle of switching to Libre Office. Again, Open Office works fine for me.

Since the forking was triggered by Oracle alienating a large fraction of OO's external development community, after they washed their hands of it and handed all the IP over to the Apache Foundation, why weren't the two groups able to merge back together?

Different licenses & pride. Prior to all this OpenOffice had been dual licensed under LGPL2/MPL. After the split, LibreOffice upgraded the license to LGPL3/MPL. When Oracle donated OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation, that included relicensing it under the Apache License.

The Apache Foundation refuses to allow LGPL(2 or 3) code into any of their project. All code must be at least as permissive as the Apache License, and must be compatible with it. LGPL3 is compatible with Apache (there were disagreements over whether LGPL2 was), but it is less permissive than Apache, so they will not allow it.

Because of this LibreOffice can freely use code from OpenOffice, but not vice-verse. And the Apache Foundation along with the few remaining OpenOffice developers have no interest in transferring the Trademark to the LibreOffice team. So OpenOffice continues to limp along as a separate project for no good reason.

Is there a practical functional difference between OpenOffice & Libre? I am long time user of MSOffice, but I'm building a RaspberryPi console, and I will need to load an office suite onto it. I'm mostly concerned with casual Word & Presentation software.

Support for the newer MS word formats is much much better in LO than in OO.Spreadsheet importing still sucks in both.Don't know much about power point.

I used to use OpenOffice a lot. However, after I left University, everywhere I went to work was MS Office. I managed to keep on OpenOffice a lot at home (and I liked used it!) but after the Excel update in 2010, where the statistical tool pak was greatly enhanced, I've started using MS Office again.

If anyone can point me to similar or greater levels of statistical analysis, that is open source, I'd be happy to switch back to be honest. Just as an FYI: I've used Minitab and SPSS, but both programs are very expensive. Far more than my non-profit working butt can afford! So if anyone could point me to something similar, that can be combined with Open/Libre Calc, I'd be very grateful!

Edit: Also, do you need to code to be able to contribute? If I could outline statistical equations that are useful to someone would that be enough to get someone to code them? Because if so, I have a list.

LibreOffice was always my preferred suite after its forking. That being said, the Apache Software Foundation is nothing to scoff at. They are really good at what they do. And OpenOffice does have the stewardship of IBM, which I would trust a lot more than Linux distribution makers as far as Office Suite software goes.

Maybe it is time to try OpenOffice again. I think OO might end up being the corporate choice (with a focus on stability and minimal bugs) and LO the more consumer choice, with features being added much quicker.

If anyone can point me to similar or greater levels of statistical analysis, that is open source, I'd be happy to switch back to be honest. Just as an FYI: I've used Minitab and SPSS, but both programs are very expensive. Far more than my non-profit working butt can afford! So if anyone could point me to something similar, that can be combined with Open/Libre Calc, I'd be very grateful!

dbmarketing: check out R (www.r-project.org). I've never been very interested in combining it with something like OO, but I *think* there was at least a project to do so.

That said, I too haven't noticed any differences between OO and LO, neither on OS X nor on Win7. I do seem to recall though that I replaced LO with OO on my gf's laptop due to stability issues (probably memory hogging).

Is either of the two capable of handling eps figures correctly, nowadays? For long that was a reason for me to stick to OO 1.1.2/X11 on my Macs, until my last PPC Mac died in fact. Then I basically switched to iWork ...

LibreOffice was always my preferred suite after its forking. That being said, the Apache Software Foundation is nothing to scoff at. They are really good at what they do. And OpenOffice does have the stewardship of IBM, which I would trust a lot more than Linux distribution makers as far as Office Suite software goes.

Maybe it is time to try OpenOffice again. I think OO might end up being the corporate choice (with a focus on stability and minimal bugs) and LO the more consumer choice, with features being added much quicker.

The the latest version of OOo is pretty much the same as the last Oracle-released version, from back in 2011. The one with improvements since its donation to Apache isn't out yet. LO maintains two concurrent branches of the suite; one for corporate and other "conservative" users that mostly just receives bugfixes or security updates, and one for home and bleeding edge users that adds features and tweaks before focusing on bugfixing. Right now the former is the 3.6 branch and the later is the 4.0 branch.

jbrodkin wrote:

What about OpenOffice 3.4? It came out in May 2012 (and then 3.4.1 came out in August). OO was transferred to Apache in 2011.

Wikipedia says that the changes from the last Oracle version were mostly cleaning up things to make them compatible with the Apache license. Since then, the improvements have mostly been adding back languages that were removed during the shift and some bugfixes.

I have both installed on my MacBook Pro. I also have NeoOffice installed. Despite this, when I recently needed to work on a project with a spreadsheet, I was forced to buy a copy of MS Office to make everything work as expected.

Total bummer when I had to do that, but the University version of Office 365 is relatively inexpensive and keeps me as compatible as possible with others using MS Office for the next 4 years.

That said, I still have lots of files in LibreOffice (which has become my favorite version outside of MS Office). And I continue to use it whenever working on stuff that doesn't require full MS Office compatibility. I like that LibreOffice gets regular updates.

If I were to rank the office suites available for Mac, it would probably go like this...

MS Office (despite the UI changes)LibreOffice (It works well, just some oddball compatibility issues)NeoOffice (pretty much the same as LibreOffice.. a few nice tweaks, but not enough to put over Libre)OpenOffice (it works fine, but doesn't see as many updates for both bugs and features)iWork (Yes, it works, but there are quite a few missing features)